i'm a beginner in programmation and... well, don't run ! I know that DirectX is an API for multimedia programmation only usable on microsoft's OS. And that openGL is for everyone .
What I mean by this question is : with Irrlicht, are there any differencies of optimization between them ? Are there useful functions usable with only one these two ?
I ask this 'cause I'm learning glsl and i'd like to know if it'd be useful to also know hlsl for shaders.
Thanks in advance everyone .
Last edited by Valerien on Fri Apr 10, 2009 3:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
i tell you one thing HLSL is confusing, i'm learning cg which is similar to it just out of a must.
generally OGL is superior to DX but the irrlicht engine does not utilise some of the VERY important aspects (i.e. keeps a copy of the texture in VRAM && RAM and not in VRAM only) and also you cannot multithread ogl (rendering contexts, texture streaming). But overall irrlicht does a WAY BETTER job of supporting OGL than DX, because there is no DX10 in it. And OGL 2.1 and 3.0 is way superior over DX9
OpenGL is also multiplaftrom (Unix based systems Mac, GNU/Linux) And also Windows compiled OpenGL irrlicht apps usually works without proplems with Wine (Windows layer for linux and mac that can run some games by translating windows api calls to linux api calls)
ALSO OpenGL is more user-friendly as he does not need to install any directx runtime packages. Personally DirectX isn't good as it said to be and OpenGL can do just as it can even the newest release of OpenGL pissed of some people. But if you are aiming windows then you should include DirectX option too if possible =)
As for shaders, they dont make so big diffrence, both are pretty easy to learn like any languange and there is also CG shader language that supports both.
Well...in fact almost every game for windows uses dx9/dx10/d11 so runtime will mostlikely already be installed. Moreover i like apis with proper samples and docu put into a chm. But if you use irrlicht you should not bother with the graphicapis .
In my experience I have have more support requests for people trying to use OpenGL and having problems with it primarily because the vendors of their integrated video have not supported OpenGL properly, while this isn't the fault of OpenGL it does make it hard to justify using OpenGL alone and you should certainly look into the issues consider DirectX support.
.
.